The Darkness Hands-on

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By Patrick Kolan

The dreaded licence game scenario is as follows: generally speaking, original is best - adaptations only dilute or disappoint fans of the series or property in question. There are, of course, obvious exceptions to this rule of thumb such as GoldenEye, Aliens vs. Predator and, more recently, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Riddick in particular took a vaguely established character, Riddick, and reinvented his back-story, putting players in a brilliantly designed first-person stealth-em-up. By all rights, the game exceeded the depth and quality of the films upon which it was based. Playing with the use of light and dark, as well as the gritty futuristic prison setting, Riddick showed exactly how to handle a licence.

Several years on, Starbreeze Studios, developer of Riddick, has emerged from cryosleep nursing a new licence - Top Cow comic series The Darkness. And based on our hands-on with the first couple of levels of the game, we're feeling the same jittery excitement we felt with Riddick. Clearly building on technology and design choices made in Riddick, the game is again played in first-person, with an emphasis on creative slaughter over straight-up gunplay. Of course, like Riddick, there is no reason why you can't gun your way through each area of the game, filling grunts with lead and strafing to victory. But the kicker is that you'll likely come off second-best in a head-on confrontation, and making use of creative solutions and stealth is the key to gameplay satisfaction.

How does all of this come together? Through the eyes of The Darkness' crooked protagonist, Jackie Estacado - a mafia hit-man working for the Franchetti family. The unfolding tale, which has been penned by the comic series' writer, Paul Jenkins, has all the New Yorkese organised crime posturing of The Sopranos, with a heady mix of excellent dialogue and violence.

Yowzers. Graphically, this is shaping up to be one of the prettiest games on the 360.

The game opens with an on-rails scenario entitled 'The Tunnel'. Taking place in the backseat of a convertible, this prologue chapter is dialogue driven, acting as an introduction to the wise-guys who Jackie will have to deal with throughout the game. Before too long, things go awry, and in spectacular fashion. Suddenly you're being pursued by several cop cars, forcing your wheelman, Mickey, to weave in and out of traffic. His buddy, Nino, is in the front as well - but not for a whole lot longer, since his head gets removed in an explosion of gore after a warm, wet greeting with the side of an oncoming truck.

It's after this point that we are finally given some control over Jackie. You're handed a boomstick and told to go to work on construction men, cops and anyone else foolhardy enough to stand between you and freedom. And so the game begins. If nothing else, The Tunnel is a fantastic display of 'vo-cap' technology being employed by the design team. For major dialogue sequences, as well as for significant characters in the game world, real actors were asked to fully act out each scene; voice, lip and movement were all tracked and stored at the same time, creating convincingly lifelike characters that are full of expression. During the car trip, Mickey and Nino share a dark and funny conversation while smoothly moving around the car interior, leaning over the sides and turning towards the player. All of this comes together in real-time as naturally as any filmic car chase.

The second area we toured, 'Grinder's Lane', takes place about an hour or so into the storyline. Using an underground subway as a kind of hub for the game's different areas, we ventured to the surface and were told to go and throw a figurative spanner into your corrupt Mafioso uncle Paulie's drug manufacturing lab - that is, torch the joint and high-tail it.